How to Improve Your Writing Anne T. Fidler, ScD Asst Dean for PH Practice BUSPH With thanks to: Peter S. Cahn, former Director of Faculty Development and Diversity, BUSM

Faculty will learn to:  Explain the importance of effective writing  Overcome writer’s block  Understand the principles of writing effective paragraphs and sentences, using appropriate choice of words  Understand plagiarism and how to avoid it

Why do we write?  We have something to say  To educate, persuade Know your audience!  To think

What do we write?  Academic (publishable) papers  Reports  Letters  s

The Bible by a Scientist Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.

Getting Started  Mark Twain’s definition a literary classic – “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”  Good writing: Something everybody wants to have written and nobody wants to write.

"If you wait for clouds to part and be struck with a bolt of lightning, you're likely to be waiting the rest of your life. But if you simply get going something will occur to you." Chuck Close, American photorealist painter and photographer

Getting started

Writing is hard… A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God. Sidney Sheldon “Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.” Lili St. Crow

Getting started…. “Authors with a mortgage never get writer's block.” Mavis Cheek “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Douglas Adams

The Blank Screen  Cover the blank screen  Dress the part  Free write  How many pages?  I argue that…  Start with the data  Top ten lists  Write a letter to your mother  Buy a new pen or certain candy bar

Before you start, remember:  More words not necessarily better than fewer words  Bigger words not necessarily better than small words

Paragraphs Introduction Conclusion Point #1 Point #2 Point #3 Say what you are going to say. Say what you just said. “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; Tell ‘em; and Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.”

1. Writing research papers does not come naturally to most of us. 2. A good research paper addresses a specific research question. 3. Generally, only one main research question should be addressed in a paper. 4. What is a good research question? 5. Once the research question is clearly defined, writing the paper becomes considerably easier. 6. In turn, each basic section addresses several topics, and may be divided into subsections. 7. The Methods section should provide the readers with sufficient detail about the study methods to be able to reproduce the study if so desired. 8. The Results section is typically fairly straightforward and factual. 9. The Discussion section allows the most freedom. 10. References should be used wisely. 11. Having the structure of the paper in place is a good start. However, there are many details that have to be attended to while writing.

Sentences “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” William Strunk, Jr.

“Major increases in the volume of prescribing of psychotherapeutic drugs in recent years have led to increasing concern over the overconsumption and misprescribing of such drugs and heightened interest in the pursuit and understanding of factors that might underlie or influence rates of drug use.” “Doctors are writing too many prescriptions for psycho- therapeutic drugs. We need to find out why.” Taryn Vian

“Major increases in the volume of prescribing of psychotherapeutic drugs in recent years have led to increasing concern over the overconsumption and misprescribing of such drugs and heightened interest in the pursuit and understanding of factors that might underlie or influence rates of drug use.” “Improvement in health care is based, to an important extent, on the viability of the biomedical research enterprise, whose success, in turn, depends on the availability of creative scientists and networks of institutions of excellence capable of producing research and teaching personnel of the highest quality possible.” “Doctors are writing too many prescriptions for psycho- therapeutic drugs. We need to find out why.” Taryn Vian

“Major increases in the volume of prescribing of psychotherapeutic drugs in recent years have led to increasing concern over the overconsumption and misprescribing of such drugs and heightened interest in the pursuit and understanding of factors that might underlie or influence rates of drug use.” “Improvement in health care is based, to an important extent, on the viability of the biomedical research enterprise, whose success, in turn, depends on the availability of creative scientists and networks of institutions of excellence capable of producing research and teaching personnel of the highest quality possible.” “Doctors are writing too many prescriptions for psycho- therapeutic drugs. We need to find out why.” Taryn Vian “Improvement in health care depends on research done by creative scientists trained by excellent teaching institutions.”

Words "I like good strong words that mean something." Louisa May Alcott "The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.“ Thomas Jefferson “Never use a quarter word where a nickel word will do.” Bill Fidler “There are approximately 500,000 words in the English language, and the only two that mean exactly the same thing are “flammable” and “inflammable.”

Real Estate Ads  Fantastic  Granite  Spacious  State-of-the-art !!  Corian  Charming  Maple  Gourmet  Great neighborhood Levitt SD and Dubner SJ Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow.

Definition of “time”:  “system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another”  “a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future”  ”what keeps everything from happening at once”  “one damn thing after another”

Colloquial language “kind of” “humongous” Condescending tone “of course” “obviously” Confusing pronouns “this” “these” Vague descriptors “numerous” “several” Misplaced modifiers “in To Kill a Mockingbird…” Overstatements “virtually all studies have shown” Self-aggrandizement “interesting finding” “exciting” Needlessly long words “utilize” “approximately” Overly precious words “elucidate” “explicate” Abbreviation overload Pet peeves

Editing: GIPSY Test  Grabber  I argue that…  Prove it  So what?  Yes, but

Plagiarism “If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.” Charles Caleb Colton “Originality is undetected plagiarism.” William Ralph Inge “If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research.” John Burke

Plagiarism occurs when a person presents the words, ideas, creations, or scholarship of another as their own. Plagiarism is a form of theft in which the intellectual property of another person is presented as one’s own work. As such, plagiarism is a serious form of scientific misconduct. Plagiarism

Source: Roberts JM History of the World. New York: Knopf, p The joker in the European pack was Italy. For a time hopes were entertained of her as a force against Germany, but these disappeared under Mussolini. In 1935 Italy made a belated attempt to participate in the scramble for Africa by invading Ethiopia. It was clearly a breach of the covenant of the League of Nations for one of its members to attack another. France and Great Britain, as great powers, Mediterranean powers, and African colonial powers, were bound to take the lead against Italy at the league. But they did so feebly and half-heartedly because they did not want to alienate a possible ally against Germany. The result was the worst possible: the league failed to check aggression, Ethiopia lost her independence, and Italy was alienated after all.

Version 1 Italy, one might say, was the joker in the European deck. When she invaded Ethiopia, it was clearly a breach of the covenant of the League of Nations; yet the efforts of England and France to take the lead against her were feeble and half-hearted. It appears that those great powers had no wish to alienate a possible ally against Hitler's rearmed Germany.

Version 2 Italy was the joker in the European deck. Under Mussolini in 1935, she made a belated attempt to participate in the scramble for Africa by invading Ethiopia. As J. M. Roberts points out, this violated the covenant of the League of Nations (Roberts, 845). But France and Britain, not wanting to alienate a possible ally against Germany, put up only feeble and half-hearted opposition to the Ethiopian adventure. The outcome, as Roberts observes, was “the worst possible: the league failed to check aggression, Ethiopia lost her independence, and Italy was alienated after all” (Roberts, 845).

Version 3 Much has been written about German rearmament and militarism in the period But Germany's dominance in Europe was by no means a foregone conclusion. The fact is that the balance of power might have been tipped against Hitler if one or two things had turned out differently. Take Italy's gravitation toward an alliance with Germany. That alliance seemed so very far from inevitable that Britain and France actually muted their criticism of the Ethiopian invasion in the hope of remaining friends with Italy. They opposed the Italians in the League of Nations, as JM Roberts observes, “feebly and half-heartedly because they did not want to alienate a possible ally against Germany” (Roberts, 845). Suppose Italy, France, and Britain had retained a certain common interest. Would Hitler have been able to get away with his remarkable bluffing and bullying in the later thirties?

Publishing  “Publish it before the numbers change…”  But where? “Proc Publish”

“tell ‘em what you told ‘em”  Get started!  A good paper depends on Good paragraphs, which depend on Good sentences, which depend on Good choice of words (make sure they are your words)  Get it published!